The use of cloud based services is rapidly growing in popularity. These services have advantages that make them extremely attractive to end users, and also make them easier to maintain from a management perspective. However, the vendors of these cloud based services all have different interfaces for setting up and managing them, which poses a challenge to the administrators responsible for keeping them working As more end users look to outsource the management of their computing infrastructure, these challenges fall onto the shoulders of the outsourced service providers, where they are multiplied even further by the sheer number of end user systems involved.
Some existing systems help to automate the provisioning of the hardware for running the cloud services. Other existing systems can automate the provisioning of the software cloud services themselves, but only in a captive environment where the provisioning tools are built into the software at both the server and the client. Still other existing systems help to automate the provisioning of cloud service software from third party sources, but only if that software is either designed or modified to fit into a new “federation” or “schema”.
Some popular existing systems that are in fairly wide use work with unmodified third party software, but does not provide any automation for setting up the end user systems to use the cloud services, and also requires manual effort for the management of each end user system. Some existing systems go further to automate at least some part of the management of multiple end user systems, but do not automate the gathering of any provisioning information from those end user systems, and often fall back to the requirement of modifying the cloud service software to conform to a new management API or “schema”.
In addition to automating the provisioning and management of cloud services on large numbers of end user systems, outsourced service providers also need tools to help manage the complexity of the billing involved. They can often get volume discounts on the cloud services, but do not want to pass along the entire discount to their customer, but instead use the difference to help their own profit margins. Some existing systems provide consolidated billing of online services through an intermediary, but lack the ability to manage multiple companies and have no automation of the data gathering from end user systems needed to set up the billing infrastructure.